In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved she tells the story of an escaped slave and her desperate attempts to lead a somewhat normal life after her horrific experiences at her former plantation, Sweet Home. The protagonist, Sethe, at the threat of being...

The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, despite their vastly different settings, both emphasize the effect of community on an individual. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, set in Boston in 1642, the rigidly Puritan society criminalizes a young...

Sethe, Paul D, and other former slave characters of Toni Morrison’s Beloved display clear signs of post traumatic stress coming from their experience in slavery and the events that resulted. For the audiences of her novel, slavery is an...

Toni Morrison decided that if she were to write stories with white characters, as she had been asked to, she would not give their perspective any dominance or privilege over that of the black characters. The voices of white characters have...

Toni Morrison explores the legacy of slavery and the price for freedom and motherly love within her novel Beloved through her main character, Sethe. For Sethe, her vision of freedom equals the ability to love her children as much as she wants...

When grappling with the concept of home within Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, one should first constitute what does not make a home. Paul D encapsulates the irony of the plantation name at Sweet Home when he describes that “it wasn’t sweet and it...

“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. [...] Every great work of art [...] is a celebration, an act of...

Hypermasculinity is prevalent in Joe Trace and Paul D. Both of these characters assert unhealthy dominance in their lives, and especially in their relationships with women. They each have past trauma that will lead to their diminished sense of...

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved deals heavily with the theme of trauma. The numerous traumas of the novel are explored mainly through instances of haunting, whether this be mental in the form of dissociation and recurring memories or physical...

In 1873 slavery had been abolished in Cincinnati, Ohio for ten years. This is the setting in which Toni Morrison places the characters for her powerfully moving novel, Beloved. After the Emancipation Proclamation and after the Civil War, Sethe,...

In an essay entitled "Writing, Race, and the Difference it Makes," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discusses the way in which over the course of history, a binary has existed between whiteness and writing, blackness and silence. Summarizing this tradition,...

When Paul D, Denver and Sethe first come upon Beloved resting against a tree after emerging from the water, the three cannot understand the past or present of the girl in front of them. Rather than interpret her odd actions, each of them looks to...

In Toni Morrison's Beloved, Beloved herself is an enigma that nobody seems capable of explaining. From a "pool of red and undulating light" (p.8) her state transforms from the supernatural to that of flesh and blood. But why has she returned? Out...

Discuss the elements which keep interpretative possibilities open in Beloved. How far are these resolved or not by the end of the narrative?

'...definitions belong to the definers not the defined.'(Beloved, p.190)

When Sixo provides an explanation...

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved contains many secondary characters, of which one of the most significant is the character of Sixo. Though the novel is based in post-Reconstruction America, much of the content is in the form of memories of ex-slaves....

The main characters in Toni Morrison's "Beloved" are former slaves; their main struggle, after having been stripped of their humanity and identity by the white men who owned them, is to reclaim self-ownership and form identities independent of...

That Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' is stylistically diverse cannot be doubted: Morrison's novel appears straightforward at first glance, opening with blank verse in a standard prose narration, but over the course of the story the style varies to...

Much like a ghost, Beloved's Sethe is caught in limbo between her past and future. She constantly struggles between the remembrances triggered by Beloved and the opportunities afforded by Paul D. Having never matured into the present, Sethe finds...

"We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth," stated the French philosopher E.M. Cioran. Though seemingly counterintuitive, this statement is undoubtedly true, begging us to question what it is about silence that...

In a novel about racism and slavery, one can not pay too much attention to the matter of colors. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, however, the issue of color is not confined to discussions on race. Blood, ribbon, even roosters, all vividly colored,...

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison conveys her strong feelings about slavery by depicting the emotional impact slavery has had on individuals. Using characters such as Mr. Garner and Schoolteacher as enablers, Morrison is able to illustrate not...

Toni Morrison uses tree imagery throughout her novel “Beloved”. For most of the characters in the novel, trees bring both good and bad recollections of their lives. Trees symbolize the energy from which the characters gain comfort and freedom, yet...

Toni Morrison uses the color red in multiple ways in her novel Beloved. On one hand red is a symbol of vibrancy and life, often revealing life in unexpected places. It also symbolizes pain and death, though death does not signify absence in a book...

In Beloved, characters experience egregious violations of their human rights that create situations that the English language cannot truly capture. The author, Toni Morrison attempts to communicate the meaning of some indescribable emotions and...